Devastation
Posted on Thu Aug 13th, 2026 @ 1:41pm by Commodore S'thenosis Gorgox & Commander Rosa Coy & Commander Jenna Ramthorne & Lieutenant Commander Bonnie "Bon-Bon" Durnell & Lieutenant Leo Da'Cinci
Edited on on Thu Aug 13th, 2026 @ 5:10pm
2,567 words; about a 13 minute read
Mission:
Pirates!
Location: USS Sunfire
USS Sunfire - Bridge
Jenna's hands still gripped the helm controls, fingers locked around them with the stubborn strength of instinct, as though some part of her had continued flying after the rest of her world had gone dark. Her head rested against the edge of the console, a line of blood tracing from her right temple and disappearing into her hair. Each breath came shallowly beneath the pressure of bruised ribs, her body curled slightly around the pain even while the emergency systems struggled to restore enough gravity to keep her anchored.
Then her memory returned with a flash of white. She could see her hands tightening on the console as the weapons pod disappeared from the tactical display. Another flash. The viewscreen vanished. There had been stars there a heartbeat before, the enormous silhouette of the Dreadnought filling the forward view, and then there had been only white fire and a wall of force rushing toward the ship.
Jenna remembered instinctively fighting the controls, trying to turn the Sunfire farther away even though the maneuver had already reached its limits. She remembered the deck tilting beneath her. She remembered the console trying to escape her hands.
Another flash. Her shoulder had struck first. Then her ribs had hit something unknown. Something else slammed into the side of her head hard enough to turn the world inside out. Her fingers locked around the helm as the bridge disappeared beneath her. She remembered the sensation of falling even though she knew the deck remained beneath her. Then darkness.
USS Sunfire - Bridge
Bonnie had braced herself for the impact. She had tucked herself beneath the console, one arm locked around its base, her muscles already tightening against the force she knew was coming. For the first fraction of a second, it had worked. Then the shockwave reached the ship.
The deck vanished beneath her. Bonnie was thrown sideways with enough force to tear her grip loose, her body tumbling through the suddenly weightless bridge. She struck something hard, spun, and collided with Dean near his tactical console before the returning artificial gravity could decide which direction was down. The impact drove the breath from her lungs, leaving her dazed as the ship rolled violently beneath them.
Then the viewscreen disappeared. The sudden decompression tore through the bridge with brutal force. Air screamed toward the opening, dragging loose equipment, debris, and anything insufficiently secured toward the forcefield that had yet to stabilize. Bonnie felt herself lifted from the deck and pulled toward the breach. There was no time to think. No time to reach for anything.
Dean caught her arm. His hand closed around her forearm with desperate strength, arresting her flight only a few meters from the opening. The sudden stop wrenched Bonnie's shoulder with a sickening force. Pain exploded through her body, bright and absolute, as her arm was pulled violently out of its socket. She screamed.
Then the forcefield snapped into place. The pressure equalized with a violent rush. Whatever strength had remained in Bonnie's body disappeared with it. Dean's grip loosened as she dropped heavily onto the deck, cradling the useless arm against her chest.
For several seconds she stared at nothing. The bridge around her had become darkness, smoke, flickering emergency illumination, and the distant groan of a ship being forced to endure things no ship should ever have to endure. Bonnie tried to breathe through the pain. Her vision narrowed. The edges of the room softened.
Somewhere nearby, someone was shouting. Somewhere farther away, an alarm continued to blare. Bonnie blinked once. The ceiling tilted. Then everything went black.
USS Sunfire - Engineering
Leo had been fighting the warp systems almost as hard as the people outside Engineering had been fighting the enemy. He had spent the last several minutes moving between the core and the EPS distribution trunks, one hand wrapped around a diagnostic reader while the other made adjustments that the computer kept insisting were unnecessary. The warp core was already compensating for damage elsewhere in the ship, and Leo knew better than to trust compensation alone.
A starship could tolerate a remarkable amount of abuse when someone kept the strain moving where it could be managed, and Leo had been doing precisely that, leaning into the vibration of the deck and listening through his boots for changes in the ship's voice. "Hold together, ye stubborn old girl," he muttered, bracing one shoulder against the console as another tremor rolled through Engineering. "Just hold together till I can get ye somewhere quiet."
Then the weapons pod detonated.
The first indication reached Engineering as a violent flash across every active display, followed almost immediately by a pressure that seemed to seize the entire compartment. Leo had just turned toward the main EPS manifold when the deck kicked beneath him. His feet left the plating and his body twisted helplessly through the air, a small, compact mass suddenly carrying all the momentum of the ship's violent roll. He struck the side of the engineering console hard enough to feel something crack beneath his shoulder, rebounded, and reached instinctively for the nearest handhold. His fingers closed around it for perhaps half a second.
Then the EPS conduit beside him ruptured.
There was no warning, only a flash of white-blue energy and a sound like the sky splitting open. The discharge caught him across the side and threw him through the compartment. Leo's body folded around the force before he struck the deck, his head snapping against the plating as the emergency lights flashed once, twice, and then disappeared. Somewhere nearby, an alarm screamed for several seconds before the ship's failing power systems swallowed it. He remained still.
The warp core continued its automatic shutdown sequence, containment systems locking down one after another as the ship's computers fought to protect the reactor from the cascading damage. Around Leo, Engineering became a landscape of ruptured conduits, fallen equipment, twisted framework, and drifting smoke. A shower of sparks descended from an overhead panel before the emergency systems finally killed the circuit.
USS Sunfire - Officer's Quarters
S’thenosis had chosen to remain in her quarters while the battle progressed, the decision founded less upon comfort than efficiency. The bridge had its command structure, and her presence there would provide little that could not be accomplished from a quiet room with access to the same tactical feeds. A PADD rested in one hand while she read through a legal memorandum with the measured concentration of someone who could apparently find an appropriate use for paperwork while a starship was being shot at. The occasional vibration beneath her feet had become an intermittent punctuation to the text, registered and dismissed with equal economy. When the weapons pod detonated, however, the distinction between background disturbance and catastrophe disappeared.
The first impact struck with enough force to remove the floor from beneath her. S’thenosis was thrown sideways, the PADD leaving her hand as the room became a blur of furniture, fractured light, and violent motion. Her physiology answered before conscious thought could intervene. Her long frame folded inward, limbs drawing close as her rigid exoskeletal structure curled around the vulnerable center of her body, scales tightening instinctively along her torso as she struck the deck and rolled with the force rather than resisting it. The next concussion drove her against the floor again, hard enough to leave her momentarily stunned, while something metallic tore loose above her and crashed against the wall. For several seconds she remained curled tightly upon herself as the ship groaned around her, every instinct insisting upon stillness until the violence passed.
When the motion finally diminished, S’thenosis slowly extended one arm and tested the deck beneath her palm. Her breathing came deeper than usual, controlled but strained, and a sharp ache had developed along her shoulder and ribs where the impact had found the limits of her natural durability. She unfolded herself with deliberate care, rising first to one knee and then to her full height as the emergency lighting flickered with uncertainty around her. Her braided hair had come partially loose from its careful arrangement, several lengths spilling across her shoulder and down toward the deck, an indignity she would ordinarily have found intolerable. For the moment, however, she regarded it with only a brief, irritated glance before locating her PADD beneath the overturned chair.
The screen had gone dark. S’thenosis stared at it for a measured moment, then tapped the casing once against her palm as though the device had personally disappointed her. Around her, the Sunfire creaked and settled into the unnatural silence of a vessel no longer certain which direction constituted down. She straightened her formal attire as best she could, retrieved the PADD, and began assessing the damage. The ship was wounded. The crew was undoubtedly wounded. She herself was bruised, shaken, and considerably less comfortable than she preferred.
The work, however, remained unfinished.
USS Sunfire - Main Shuttlebay
The blast reached the shuttle bay with almost no warning. One moment Rosa sat strapped into the cockpit of her shuttle, hands resting loosely near the controls as she waited for the order to launch, and the next the entire bay lurched sideways with such violence that the harness cut into her shoulders. The artificial gravity failed beneath her, returned, failed again, and then the shuttle itself began to move. Through the forward viewport she saw the bay doors distort as the pressure inside the compartment collapsed. Warning lights erupted across her console, red and amber reflections racing across the canopy as atmosphere began tearing itself out of the bay.
The first shuttle went through the opening before Rosa fully understood what she was seeing. It was ripped from its restraints and carried backward into the widening darkness, tumbling end over end as the last of its atmosphere vented into space. For one terrible instant she could see the cockpit windows clearly enough to know there was someone inside. Then the shuttle disappeared beyond the bay, swallowed by the blackness surrounding the Sunfire. Another followed. Then another.
Rosa's hands closed around the controls as instinct screamed at her to launch, but there was nowhere to go. The bay itself had become a weapon. Shuttles tore free of their docking clamps and slammed into one another as the decompression pulled them toward the open doors. One struck the bulkhead hard enough to crumple its forward section, and another spun across the bay before colliding with the blast doors. Metal shrieked through the cockpit speakers as emergency systems struggled to compensate for a pressure differential that no system aboard the Sunfire had been designed to survive.
She saw people. That was what stayed with her. A mechanic was thrown from the deck and caught for a heartbeat against a handrail before the force ripped him free. Rosa knew him. She had spoken to him that morning. She knew the sound of his voice and the way he always complained about the flight teams leaving their diagnostic panels open. She watched him disappear through the ruptured section of the bay with both hands reaching for something that was no longer there.
Someone else struck the underside of a shuttle as it lifted from its restraints. The impact threw the person beneath it, and Rosa saw the body vanish beneath the tumbling hull before the shuttle itself was dragged away. A flight technician tried to crawl toward the emergency bulkhead, but the deck had become a slope beneath him. He reached the threshold just as another shuttle slammed into the doors and sent debris through the opening.
Rosa shouted something. She never knew what. The sound vanished beneath the roar. Her shuttle tore loose. The restraints released with a violent metallic crack, and suddenly she was moving backward. The cockpit tilted until the stars outside became a spinning field of gold and black. Her shoulder struck the side of the seat. Her head snapped against the headrest. Something exploded behind her, filling the cockpit with sparks and the smell of burning insulation.
She fought for the controls, but there was nothing to control.
The shuttle struck the bulkhead sideways. The impact crushed the breath from her lungs and sent a wave of pain through her body. The cockpit rotated violently, the canopy filling with sparks as the shuttle scraped along the wall. The sound became enormous, a grinding shriek of metal against metal that seemed to pass directly through her bones. Something struck the side of her helmet. Her vision flashed white.
Then the shuttle stopped. Everything stopped. For several seconds Rosa remained suspended against the restraints, unable to understand why the world had suddenly become still. Her ears rang.
The cockpit lights flickered once, twice, and then settled into a dim emergency glow. Smoke curled through the cabin in thin gray ribbons. The shuttle had come to rest on its side, wedged against the bulkhead at an angle that made the entire cockpit feel wrong. The deck was no longer beneath her. It was somewhere beside her, and her body had not yet accepted the difference.
She tried to move. Pain answered immediately. Her left shoulder burned. Something along her ribs felt as though it had been driven inward. Her right hand trembled against the harness release, and for several seconds she could not make her fingers obey her. “Come on,” she whispered.
Her own voice sounded distant as she forced herself to look through the canopy. The shuttle bay was almost unrecognizable. Emergency forcefields flickered where sections of hull had been torn open. Fires burned in places where fires had no right to exist, their flames twisting strangely in the failing atmosphere. Shuttles lay scattered across the deck, some crushed against one another, others resting at impossible angles. At least one had disappeared entirely.
Rosa stared at the empty space where it should have been. Her breathing became shallow. She knew who had been sitting in it. The thought arrived with such clarity that she nearly stopped breathing altogether.
She looked toward the opposite side of the bay and began searching for the others. Her flight team. The mechanics. Anyone. She called names, first quietly and then louder, but the cockpit swallowed the words and returned only static.
Nothing answered. She reached for the comm panel. The display flickered. “Flight control to shuttle bay,” she said, forcing her voice into something resembling procedure. “Flight control to shuttle bay. Respond.” Static.
She swallowed and tried again. “Anyone. Respond. Please...” Still nothing.
Her hand remained against the console. Rosa slowly allowed herself to understand what she had witnessed. The Sunfire had not merely been damaged. People had died. People she knew had died. Some had been pulled into space. Others had been crushed beneath shuttles or bulkheads. Others had vanished so completely that she could not even know how they had died.
Her eyes closed. For one second she let herself feel it. Then the shuttle groaned around her. Rosa opened her eyes. The sound came again, deeper this time, followed by a shower of sparks somewhere behind the cockpit. The emergency display began flashing a warning she could barely read through the smoke.
The ship was still breaking. And she was still inside it.
TBC
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